Don Begg, a bronze artist and founder of Studio West, prepares to give a facelift to a statue of hockey great Wayne Gretzky at his foundry in Cochrane, Alta., Friday, Aug. 5, 2016.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

COCHRANE, Alta. – He stands nine feet two inches tall and hasn’t aged a bit, but the statue of hockey great Wayne Gretzky could use a waxing and a bath.

The 430-kilogram bronze statue of No. 99 holding the Stanley Cup over his head has been on display at Rexall Place for the past 27 years, but with a move to a new arena in the near future he’s taken a road trip down south to where he was created.

“Yes it’s a facelift,” laughed Don Begg, a bronzesmith with Studio West in Cochrane, west of Calgary, who worked on casting the statue back in 1989 after it was sculpted by John Weaver.

“Actually he still looks pretty good to me. We’ve examined him over and he’s really in good shape but everything needs a little bit of tender loving care after 27 years.”

During a recent visit to Begg’s Studio West workshop, the statue was hanging horizontally. It was partly covered – including the Stanley Cup – but The Great One’s smiling face and Oiler logo were clearly visible.

The biggest challenge, said Begg, was removing him from his spot at Rexall Place. The old bolts now have to be removed, new ones put in and then he will be waxed, shined up and made to “look like he’s brand new” for the new location.

Begg, who used to live in Edmonton, admits to having a “soft spot” for the Oilers and especially Gretzky. When a statue like this one is created they always break the mould – much like Gretzky the hockey player.

“We broke the mould but he’s still there and that’s the main thing.”

Begg said he’s stopped by and checked on the statue a number of times over the years. He said there is absolutely no damage, though Mother Nature has added a few touches over the years.

“We don’t have any control over the birds. We don’t have any control over the weather and the dust and the dirt that blows around,” he said.

“They do a small amount of maintenance and we’re just going to shine him up to go into a new location.”

There are pictures of the creation of the statue – including a number of Gretzky himself – on a bulletin board outside the workshop.

Begg said he’s proud to have been part of the Gretzky statue, and that the fact it’s in bronze makes it all the better.

“Whether we cast him or we sculpt him it really is an honour to be part of that – of something that’s going to last for thousands of years,” Begg said.

“There’s nothing you can make that lasts as long as a bronze.”

Begg said he doesn’t expect the clean up to take more than a week as opposed to the six months spent during the creation process.

The public-relations problems continue to pile up for Daryl Katz, the drugstore magnate who wants a new downtown arena in Edmonton for his NHL Oilers to play in. It has been more than a year since Katz Group and the city’s council arrived at a “framework” for an arena funding deal, with Katz relenting on his insistence that the existing Rexall Place be pushed out of the concert business. That framework fell apart Oct. 18 after Katz made new demands and a previously sympathetic council ran out of patience, calling off negotiations and flinging the arena into limbo.

The city had made major concessions to get Katz to back off on the demand for a non-compete agreement with Northlands, the powerful non-profit that operates Rexall Place (i.e., the old Northlands Coliseum, which now bears the name of Katz’s main pharmaceutical brand). But the two sides remained $100 million short of the full amount for the new building—money that both insisted, despite an endless series of fairly strident refusals from the province and Ottawa, would eventually arrive courtesy of “another level of government.”

This confidence in future largesse from on high was one of the enduring mysteries of the arena debate. But on Oct. 24 one of the pieces of the puzzle may have fallen into place as the province’s ruling Progressive Conservatives disclosed their campaign finances from the spring election. The PCs had been atypically hard-pressed by their new Wildrose rival, so much so that they spent $4.7 million on the campaign while raising only $1.6 million in donations—about half as much as the Wildrose took in.

The PCs’ 2012 donors turned out to include the Katz Group, Daryl Katz, his wife, his father, his mother, and several of his employees and business partners. The Globe and Mail dug into the disclosure docs, worked party sources, and learned that Katz had written the PCs a single cheque for $430,000, which was then split up amongst individuals in order to comply with a limit of $30,000 per campaign period. According to the Globe, the money arrived late in the campaign, just as the PCs were struggling in the polls.

The letter of Alberta election law seems clear on the “one cheque, many receipts” style of split donation: under section 34 (1) of the Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure Act, no person is allowed to donate “funds not actually belonging to” them or “funds furnished . . . for the purpose of making a contribution.” And Katz may have another problem: according to a number of media reports, he lives in Vancouver, California, as well as his native Edmonton. Individual donors to provincial parties are legally required to be “ordinarily resident” in Alberta. The Globe’s revelations set off an investigation by Alberta’s chief electoral officer, Brian Fjeldheim, and after Maclean’s made note of the residency requirements in an online post, his spokesman declared that the investigation would include those too.

Alberta’s PC premier, Alison Redford, has remained as firm as ever about refusing to top up the Edmonton arena deal. Katz had apparently expected the city of Edmonton to somehow secure a provincial casino licence to fill in the last $100 million, but Redford is still saying there will be no cash and no casino. She has also promised to make the results of the electoral officer’s investigation public—something Alberta law does not yet technically require.

Meanwhile, the hubbub surrounding Katz’s donation has had the effect of raising questions about his presence on the board of AIMCo, the corporation that invests public pension funds and endowments (such as the Heritage Savings Trust Fund) on behalf of the province. The WAM Development Group is in business with Katz to develop the area around the proposed arena; WAM and AIMCo, meanwhile, are partners in northeast Calgary’s $3-billion StoneGate Landing office-retail complex, the biggest such project in that city’s history. Alberta Finance Minister Doug Horner, who appoints the AIMCo board, laughed off Wildrose questions in the provincial assembly about the links, saying, “Mr. Speaker, next they’ll probably be suggesting that I was at the grassy knoll when JFK was assassinated.”

]]>“It’s fairly apparent at this point that Daryl just isn’t that into us.” This wisecrack from Edmonton city Councillor Kerry Diotte concluded a chaotic Oct. 17 in city hall. Diotte has been a critic of the city administration’s deal with Edmonton Oilers owner Daryl Katz for a new downtown arena, but most of the council, including Mayor Stephen Mandel, thought the formula had been found. Katz was to supply just $100 million of the $450-million construction cost, providing maintenance over a 35-year lease. In exchange, the team was to get rent-free use of the building, revenue from all events, control of naming rights and other perks.

Last fall, Katz asked that his upfront $100 million be turned into an annuity of roughly $5.5 million a year over the lease period; the city acquiesced. It also agreed to pay the Oilers $20 million, supposedly to promote the city, over the first decade of the agreement. As the Canadian Taxpayers Federation pointed out, the naming rights alone would be worth somewhere between $3 million and $5 million a year. Katz’s net contribution to the building was already approaching zero.

Then last month the Katz Group informed the city that $450 million would no longer quite cover the building it wanted—and that, by the way, as arena operator it would need another $6-million annual subsidy. The city summoned Katz to an Oct. 17 meeting to explain. When he declined, council voted to suspend negotiations.

Anything is possible now. Before adjourning last week, councillors discussed building the arena according to the existing plan (which cost the city $30 million) or searching for savings. Renovating the existing Rexall Place for around $200 million, an idea long dismissed by Mandel’s bloc, is looking more attractive.

Either way, the Oilers’ lease runs out in 2014. Katz might choose to erect his own ice palace in the suburbs if he is liquid enough. Despite a net worth estimated at $2.4 billion, his miserliness suggests he may not be. (His retail pharmacy business is under regulatory pressure and he is known to have real estate in Vancouver’s flagging market.) If he can’t find a superior market for his NHL team—and no one knows of one—a fire sale may follow.

One hundred million dollars. A one, eight zeroes. That is what’s standing between the city of Edmonton and its planned new downtown home for the NHL’s Oilers. No big deal, say supporters of the space-age barn that would replace aging Rexall Place. That’s a fraction of the cost of a major highway overpass. Done right, say the starry-eyed, it could transform Edmonton’s infamously sleepy downtown. But where is the money going to come from? The city’s sweetheart deal with its richest citizen, Oilers owner and pharmacy billionaire Daryl Katz, left that $100-million gap to be shaded in through the largesse of “other levels of government.”

So far, those other levels have refused to consider it, and pretty convincingly, too. When Rexall Place (originally the Edmonton Coliseum) was built in 1974, the city got help from, among others, the federal agriculture department. But in government circles, the days of that kind of creativity are over. The federal government passed through a period of fiscal stimulus when the financial crisis hit, but wanted the money to go to “shovel-ready” projects. Edmonton’s dream palace didn’t even exist on paper yet.

The messages from under the dome of the Alberta legislature are largely the same now. Asked about the funding gap, Edmonton city manager Simon Farbrother says, “There continue to be informal discussions with the province,” and notes that a provincial election is around the corner in the spring. In an auction for votes, it is possible that new Premier Alison Redford might improvise anything. But Redford’s preferred branding, a close adviser warns, is about “people, not buildings.” Her predecessor, Ed Stelmach, was an old-fashioned pavin’ politician. Redford’s campaign focus—an unsurprising one for a human-rights lawyer—is expected to remain squarely on health, education, and seniors.

The $100-million gap thus continues to hover menacingly in the ether, even as the city spends $30 million upfront on arena design. The construction cost for the rink is estimated at $450 million, with $125 million of this to come from a “facility improvement fee”—i.e., a ticket tax on Oilers customers. Another $125 million comes directly from the city, which has promised not to increase property taxes to cover the cost.

What a lot of Edmontonians are wondering is why Daryl Katz can’t close the funding gap all by himself. Katz’s net worth is estimated to be $2.8 billion by Canadian Business, which ranks him 18th on its Rich 100 list (ahead of iconic names like Frank Stronach, Seymour Schulich and Charles Bronfman). Until recently, when he was surpassed by a couple of Calgary oilmen and the natural order of things was restored, this lifelong Edmontonian was considered the richest Albertan. In fact, because his 1,800-store Katz Group pharmacy empire is privately held and few are privy to his debt arrangements, it is inherently difficult to be confident in any estimate of Katz’s net wealth. (The chain includes PharmaPlus, Rexall, Guardian, and IDA drugstores, among others.) The Katz Group declined to comment on the arena plan.

Katz keeps a low profile in Edmonton, though his compound across the river from Hawrelak Park has become an informal tourist attraction, and locals have learned to watch the skies for his private jet when a hockey player needs wooing in free agency or calling up from the minor leagues. His wealth, earned by buying up unprofitable mom-and-pop drugstores and turning them around with superior marketing and supply techniques, has made him an increasingly contentious figure in the city as council struggles to buy him a big glass showcase for his Oilers. (It doesn’t help that his closed-circle approach to management, so effective in the pill trade, has yielded nothing but putridity for the Oilers in the standings.)

Other new arenas in Canadian NHL cities were built almost entirely with private money, but Katz’s advocates, who include a horde of downtown property owners, have succeeded in leveraging Edmontonians’ fears of losing the Oilers franchise in the event of a downturn in the dollar. Dwindling exchange rates still seem natural to some Canadians, even though the loonie’s current near-parity with the U.S. greenback represents the long-term historic norm.

And it is not clear where the Oilers might go even if Katz decided to seek greener pastures. Forbes magazine’s latest valuations of the market value of NHL teams have the Oilers, despite their “small market,” ranked in the dead centre of the league at 15th. (They are worth an estimated $212 million, which cannot be too far off, since Katz paid an estimated $200 million for them in 2008.) The Oilers contribute to revenue-sharing for beleaguered American clubs, and, like other Canadian teams, get just a one-thirtieth share of TV money that is mostly earned in Canada.

Katz has been handed control of the prospective new arena and its revenues, in exchange for nothing more than paying the maintenance costs, keeping the team in town, and kicking in $100 million upfront on the construction cost of the building. At least, that is the deal Edmontonians thought they were getting until Oct. 14, when his arrangement with the city was finalized. The city has promised the Oilers $20 million over 10 years in promotional funding, and the “up front” $100 million coming back will now be paid out over 30 years. As ex-mayor Cec Purves pointed out last month in a stinging critique of the arena project, that means Katz is technically making no equity contribution to the building at all. (He is to cover half of the estimated $50-million cost of a pedestrian overpass connecting the arena to the downtown core.)

When you look at Katz’s main business line, the reluctance to let go of cash becomes understandable. The provinces, led by Ontario, are using regulation to cut drugstores’ margins on generic drugs and make them more dependent on providing advice to customers at tightly circumscribed rates. Katz Group and Shoppers Drug Mart tried to fight back with a vertical-integration move toward selling their own private-label generics; a December decision from the Ontario Court of Appeal, however, upheld the province’s right to forbid the practice. According to analysts, this sets up a race among the big drug chains to take over small outfits and independent stores that can still be modernized—changed to adapt to a world in which the money isn’t made at the drug counter, but in the candy and cosmetics aisles.

The Katz Group’s strong desire for cash was made clear on Jan. 30 when it announced the sale of $920 million in assets to McKesson Canada, a pharmacy logistics company with which it has a long-standing relationship. The all-cash deal included Drug Trading Co., the marketing and purchasing arm for many of Katz’s non-Rexall-branded pharmacies; in exchange for about a billion dollars now, Katz Group becomes a McKesson customer for functions it used to perform on its own. Katz also sold McKesson the franchise business of the Medicine Shoppes chain, the very asset with which he began his business in 1991 after leaving the practice of law. The billionaire has a long track record of philanthropy, but having just sold the heart of his empire, he may not be likely to solve the city’s $100-million mystery with a surprise gesture of liberality.